Saturday, 15 May 2010

The UK Election explained to US readers

The following article By Director of the Libertarian Alliance Sean Gabband published at the highly recommended VDARE.com was written last weekend before the formation of the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition government (otherwise known as the Con-dem s- or condoms if you prefer) however, it gives an excellent explanation of that strange beast which is British democracy which may help our overseas friends understand how we go to where we are.

I have been asked to write for VDARE.COM’s mostly American readership about the British general election of May 6 2010. In trying to do this, I am at a double disadvantage. First, most Americans naturally know little about Britain. Second, this is a drama unfolding by the hour. Whatever I write now (Sunday evening, May 9) will be out of date shortly.

I will arrange my comments under three headings: How the System Works in General: How the System Worked on This Occasion; What the Meaning of All This Might be for Liberty and Tradition.

1. How the System Works in General

The House of Commons is the central body of British government. It is made up of 650 Members, including the Speaker. Each Member of Parliament [MP] represents one geographical district of roughly equal population, called a "constituency". He is elected by the "first past the post system", which means that the winner of the seat needs to gain a majority of one over any other candidate. In other words, it is elected on the same basis as the U.S. House of Representatives—which, however, shares power with the U.S. Senate and the President.

Theoretically, this election process can lead to overall outcomes in which one of the main parties gains a majority of the total votes cast, but another wins a majority of seats in the House of Commons. This happens rarely in Britain. But over the last half-century or so, the British political party system has fragmented to a much greater degree than has happened in the U.S. (yet). As a result, it has become common for a party to get a small majority in overall votes cast, but a large Commons majority. Thus in the last general election, Labour won 356 seats and a substantial Commons majority with 36.9 per cent of the vote—which, on a turnout of 61.3 per cent, meant that it won with just over 22 per cent of the total possible vote.

A further consequence of this system: small parties are effectively blocked from the House of Commons. For example, in the 2010 general election, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) got around a million votes and the British National Party (BNP) got over half a million votes. (Both are fiercely opposed to immigration). But these were votes picked up across the country as a whole. Because neither party won a majority of the vote in one specific constituency, neither party has any seats in the House of Commons.

Indeed, even the smallest of the three main parties is at a disadvantage. In the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats won 23 per cent of the votes cast and got 57 seats, while Labour won 29 per cent, and got 258 seats.

There are about a dozen nationalists from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland—referred to in Britain as the "Celtic" fringe. Otherwise, every seat is held by the three main parties—Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat.

Whatever the democratic legitimacy of the outcome, the party that wins an overall majority of seats in the House of Commons is allowed to form the Government. That is, the leader of the largest party becomes Prime Minister, and then appoints all the other Ministers.

And whoever controls the House of Commons has absolutely unlimited power over the life, liberty and property of everyone in the United Kingdom.

Britain has no written constitution, no entrenched bill of rights, no counterbalancing institutions. Back in 1776, the British Constitution was regarded as a balance of Crown, Lords and Commons, each able to check the other. Many judges and politicians also believed that there were certain fundamental laws that the courts could uphold against combined attack by Crown, Lords and Commons. This was the template for the American Constitution.

Since then, however, the Lords have lost their blocking veto. The Crown—especially during the reign of "Elizabeth the Useless" (1952-)—has given up all attempt to preserve the Constitution from attack. The courts have accepted the doctrine of the absolute legislative supremacy of Parliament—which means of whoever controls the House of Commons.

In theory, an Act of Parliament—even passed by a majority of one in a Commons where the governing party received perhaps ten per cent of the total possible vote—could order the execution of every man in the country with red hair. It could make it an offence to whistle in the streets of Paris. It could repeal the Government of India Act 1947, and try sending out a new Viceroy to govern India. It could declare that three plus five equals nine. Regardless of its morality or physical means of enforcement, such an Act would be regarded by the courts as absolutely binding within the United Kingdom.

For a long time, this peculiar doctrine was allowed to do little harm. The House of Commons was dominated by members of the old ruling class, and these made sure to govern as if constrained by an entrenched constitution. By a process of gradual change during the 20th century, however, the old ruling class was displaced first in its personnel and then in its values.

This was a gradual process, and no single year can easily be chosen to mark the transition. Whatever year is chosen, despotic laws can be adduced from before, and successful insistences on the old norms can be adduced from after. But perhaps the two most important dates were the election years of 1979 and 1997.

In the first of these, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government was elected at a time of crisis. It believed its agenda of economic and political change should not be limited by any constitutional norm.

Since 1997, Britain has been turned from a reasonably free country into a police state. I have a good legal background. Even so, I no longer know what the laws are or how they are enforced. Indeed, it probably no longer matters what the laws say, as the police and administration often make them up as they go along.

Since 1997, habeas corpus has been abolished. We have serious criminal trials without juries. [First trial without jury approved, BBC News, June 18, 2009] The rule against double jeopardy has been abolished. Hearsay and similar fact evidence can be introduced. The police and 20,000 civil servants have the right to conduct warrantless searches of our homes. The police can authorise each other to break into homes to plant listening devices. Despite solid opposition, Labour is about to force to carry biometric identity cards that will give the authorities the ability to spy on—and therefore to control—every aspect of our private lives.

We know that the great majority of immigrants who have been granted citizenship vote for the Labour Party. There is also much anecdotal evidence—though this is not mentioned in the Main Stream Media—that illegal immigrants and "asylum seekers" are being registered to vote so that they can increase the Labour share of the vote.

Our registration laws date back to a time when nearly everyone in the country was a citizen. Registration to vote was a formality for when someone reached the age of majority or moved house. The law is based on trust—and this trust is easily abused by a little perjury that is then connived at by the pro-Labour administrators who control most of local government.

As a libertarian patriot, I take a less pessimistic view of immigration than other patriots. However, what we presently have is state-sponsored mass-immigration. This has been a deliberate policy of the British ruling class to break up resistance to despotism—recently admitted by Andrew Neather, one of Tony Blair’s speechwriters. When people are sufficiently balkanised, they will suspect each other more than the authorities.

None of the Regime parties will do anything about immigration. It must be said, though, that of the three the Conservatives have dropped the strongest hints that they might.

Oh—and the country has been formally enslaved to the centralised, bureaucratic European Union, which now makes most of the laws not mentioned above. And the country’s foreign policy has become a matter of slavishly assisting in whatever act of imperialism and mass-murder the U.S. Government may see fit to begin. The Iraq and Afghan Wars serve no British interest. They have resulted in perhaps millions of deaths. They were opposed by solid majorities of British opinion. They went ahead nevertheless.

3. How the System Worked on This Occasion

How any main opposition party could fight an election campaign against our Government of unindicted traitors and war criminals, and not win an overall majority of 300, is a cause for astonishment. But that is what the Conservative party has just managed. It got 36 per cent of a 65 per cent turnout—that is, it won just over 23 per cent of the total possible vote.

The Conservatives did emerge as the largest single party in terms both of votes and seats. But of course a party needs 326 seats in the House of Commons to have an overall majority. The Conservatives got 306 seats, making them twenty short of a majority.

The cause of this astonishing failure was the leadership of David Cameron. It would be hard to think of anyone who could not have led the Conservatives to victory after thirteen years of what we have had. The problem is that Mr Cameron is just that person. He refuses to discuss Europe or immigration except in the mildest and most plainly fraudulent terms. He claims to be a fanatical environmentalist. He has accepted nearly the whole of the Labour Revolution.

His disagreements with Labour have not been entirely cosmetic. He and his party are better than Labour on many issues. But these are not issues critical to national survival.

And there is no doubt that several million people who would have voted to save their nation decided it was not worth the effort of voting for a Conservative Government led by someone who looks and tries to sound depressingly like Tony Blair.

Why bother voting for a different man to front the same policies of treason and destruction?

And so no party can be said to have won the election. Here, for the sake of completeness, are the results so far:

Seats

Change

Vote %

Conservative

306

+97

36.1

Labour

258

-91

29.0

Liberal Democrat

57

-5

23.0

It will be seen that, while the Conservatives did not get an overall majority, the Labour Party was badly hit, and the Liberal Democrats lost seats. Nobody won in the usual sense. So far as this is possible within a zero-sum game, they all lost.

Indeed a comprehensive article that puts the essential issues in one place.

Thank you, Sarah.

I take issue with Dr Gabb on one point, though, where he states that Britain has no written constitution.

While Britain has no single document as such, unlike the Americans, Britain's written constitution is embodied in the great documents of state, including Magna Carta 1215 and the 1689 Bill of Rights and 1701 Act of Settlement etc.

In essence, all these documents are meant to be embodied in the Coronation Oath, which is also written. (Regrettably, the oath was tampered with in 1910, with the help of the spiritualist Conan Doyle, who was educated at the Jesuit Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. His educational background is, I believe, significant.)

A good write-up on Britain's written constitution is found in Vigilance, A Defence of British LIberty by long-term anti-EU researcher Ashley Mote.

Our documents of state provide a legal basis for leaving the EU, ousting Islam, dismantling multi-culti-ism, reversing immigration and bringing to book all the Quislings who embroiled us in all these abominations in the first place.

That was entertaining, although there was little that was new beyond the personal speculations and opinions of the writer.

A question comes to my mind that seems to apply both to Parliament and to the US Congress. After members are elected saying that they subscribe to a particular party, do they no longer have brains, consciences, or free will? Do they necessarily do what the party tells them to do? That seems to be the understanding, and while I know it does not always happen, it seems to happen to what I think is an alarming degree.

If I elect John to represent me as a conservative, I hope that he will speak, and vote, according to conservative principles. I hope that he will do those things, independent of what the party leadership may be telling him to do because the party leadership does not care a whit about the needs of his constituency (where I live) that he represents. Do our "representatives" completely loses sight of the idea of representation after they are elected? Is this how the system is expected to work everywhere?

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Thomas Jefferson

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that thesepeople are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the tworaces, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature,habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."--Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:72

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A few quotes from history

"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State." (Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels)

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote! (Benjamin Franklin)

"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise." (Adolf Hitler)

Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lieBut rather mourn the apathetic throngThe cowed and the meekWho see the world's great anguish and its wrongAnd dare not speak. (Ralph Chaplin 1887-1961)